My original post on anarchism and the cataclysms of the 20th century has certainly engendered some lively debate, and here's something to add to it. It's actually to draw the attention of Troppo Armadillians to the work of a man I've only just become aware of(in fact since yes...
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Mark Bahnisch publishes a letter from neo-communist Italian intellectual Antonio Negri, which seems fairly convincingly to debunk most if not all of Keith Windschuttle's attacks on him. The failure of basic research/fact-checking in Windschuttle's Negri letter appears consider...
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The future of Australian federalism has been a much discussed topic recently among the commentariat of both mainstream and blogosphere. It's hardly surprising given John Howard's extraordinarily hubristic statement that Australia would be better off without state governments....
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Tim Dunlop blogs about the influence of Howard government "black arts" gurus Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor on British Tory election campaigning: Sorry, but it's a crock. I mean, far be it from me to defend Lynton Crosby, and I'm sure he is organising such a campaign, but in so...
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Indonesia can't take a trick at the moment. The Prime Minister is sending medical teams back to Sumatra; hell, they only got home this month from the last earthquake. I mean, its just terrible. Two in three months...
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Today's ruling by the trial judge in the Michael Jackson child sexual abuse case, allowing the prosecution to lead evidence of other alleged incidents of abuse of young boys by Jackson, makes a conviction significantly more likely: Legal analysts say the admission of such expl...
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Funny the directions in which research for books can take you. As part of my research for my planned detective fiction series, I've been reading a lot of 'true-crime' books from the 1910's, 20's and 30's, and one of the authors I've been reading is a once-famous writer and cri...
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Tasmanian tiger spotted begging for food outside the Subway outlet in City Walk Canberra (it seems to like meatballs).
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I tried to post this on the most appropriate blog - our host at ubersportingpundit central - but couldn't log in - so you'll have to put up with me venting spleen here. Probably the best thing that's happened to Australian soccer took place during the third quarter of the AFL...
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Biodiesel is one of the most promising sources of renewable energy . Made from crops like soy beans, American supporters claim it can enhance national security , protect the environment, and reduce the trade deficit. Farmers , environmentalists , and opponents of the war in Ir...
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Biodiesel is safer for the environment because it produces lower emissions and is made from renewable sources, say supporters . But the snag for morally motivated vegetarians is that those renewable sources can include cows, pigs, and chickens. Biodiesel is an alternative to p...
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Having apparently defeated the Trackback spammers with the (unsought but still welcome) assistance of Scott's domain host, we now seem to be under concerted attack by a renewed and virulent form of comment spam. At the moment it appears that MT blacklist doesn't delete thes sp...
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A light and tasty post to leave you for Easter..and a happy Easter to all! Chez nous, it's ducks, ducks, ducks at the moment, as the 14-strong regiment of Muscovy ducklings we've reared have become big enough to well, become dinner. We've had duck 'a toutes les sauces', you mi...
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One of the reasons I thought I'd like to do some writing on Troppo is that I have recently become a columnist for the Courier Mail. I thought I would like to try out 'open sourcing' a column. So I proposed to Ken that I post forthcoming columns on Troppo a few days before they...
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One of Professor Bunyip's blogging obsessions is excessively intrusive traffic policing in his home State of Victoria. It's understandable if Bracks' henchmen are anything like NSW, with whose practices I'm much more familiar through annual holiday visits. Speed cameras prolif...
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I got an email from the hosting company this morning alerting me to the amount of trackback spam and they have disabled the trackback script. I'm content to leave it off. Trackbacks are nice, but they are not worth the effort to keep afloat. It is a considerable pity that this...
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The Good Professor weighs in on the Schiavo case : Well pardon a Bunyip being frank, but this business isn't about compassion. It's about control -- control of both the individual and society's direction. As so many advocates of slow starvation are now demonstrating, they beli...
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A case of the Dreaded Lurgi hasn't prevented me from reading the papers, as per usual. As I was wiping snot off the monitor, I came across this article , describing the controversy about these 'do it yourself' DNA kits. It is not quite at the 'do it yourself' stage, but it is...
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The other day, in Sydney, I went to see Bride and Prejudice with my daughter. In case you don't know, this is a Bollywoodised version of Jane Austen's great work(which is always put at no 2 on world 'top hundred' reading lists these days, behind Lord of the Rings!). I'd heard...
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The East Timor-Australia maritime boundary issue is in the news again, with the Financial Times running an article quoting Timor Leste Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri as hoping that an agreement might be able to be reached by July. Apparently Australia has increased its offer for...
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Ken's jumped the gun on me , so I may as well officially launch my new blog and declare it open! Troppo readers are of course very welcome visitors. And thanks everyone for all your kind words on my farewell post here .
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I must confess I hadn't taken much notice of the Terri Schiavo case until now. Schiavo is a severely brain-damaged (vegetative?) American woman currently being effectively starved to death through cutting off her intravenous feeding tubes. Perhaps partly because of instinctive...
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Here is a discussion board post I've prepared for my first year Introduction to Public Law students here at CDU, to focus their minds on fundamental constitutional concepts in a topical, real world context. I thought some Troppo readers might also be interested. Richard Acklan...
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One of the more disturbing items in this morning's news is a report that not only are police pushing for special inquisitorial courts with reduced standards of proof for the trial of terrorism suspects, but that apparently the only objection our highly principled Amnesty Inter...
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Is anyone surprised that Mark Bahnisch resisted his blogging addiction for approximately 1.5 seconds at his new digs ?
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Now that Mark Bahnisch has gone solo and presumably taken his sociology/philosphy minded readers with him, we can get back to politics. It's good timing on Mark's account because after a six month slumber after the election, some interesting things are happening, not least to...
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Last night my kids were watching the swimming championships on the tele and the National Bank ad came on. "You said you wanted us to listen. So we listened. You said you wanted better service: We've given you better service". Or whatever it says. Then we switched to John Clark...
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In the post immediately below , I argue that it's an error to label John Howard as a "neocon" comparable to George W Bush. However, that isn't to say that there aren't some interesting and instructive parallels to be drawn, especially in terms of the rhetoric and mindset of co...
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This story from Indonesia rather suggests that early optimism about its progress towards liberal democracy was seriously premature: Indonesians will be barred from kissing in public under new laws criticised by human rights groups as draconian. Justice Minister Hamid Awaluddin...
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(via Jacques Chester) Apparently the Howard government has now introduced into the House of Representatives a Bill that effectively abolishes compulsory student unionism in Australia. The principal operative provision reads: (1) A higher education provider must not: (a) requir...
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Apparently left-leaning fact-checker extraordinaire and UNSW IT academic Tim Lambert is celebrating April Fool's day early, and has set up a mirror site of Tim Blair's blog . But there's a very real question of just who's the fool here. Naturally it's got all TB's RWDBs huffin...
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Bunyip's unlikely nemesis? Bloggers and spammers could be forced to put their names to political commentary in a bid to close a loophole in the nation's electoral laws. Roused by last year's furore over anonymous political websites such as www.johnhowardlies.com , the Howard G...
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Australian citizenship is a valuable thing - too valuable to be wasted on people who don't understand our fundamental values, beliefs, and traditions. In Britain they've been working on a new ' Britishness test ' for would-be citizens. Their Labour party says that it wants to...
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"Jane", the lesbian student teacher at the centre of several recent Troppo posts that mostly generated more heat than light, has posted an extensive response here . I strongly urge everyone who read any of the original posts to read Jane's response. It certainly sets to rest m...
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A wise innkeeper never lets a bed get cold before renting the room to a new guest. So it is here at Troppo . Scarcely has Mark Bahnisch rubbed the sleep from his eyes and ventured out into the big bad world of blogging, than Nicholas Gruen leaps in between the armadillian shee...
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Recently John Quiggin's blog hosted a guest post from me and I wanted to put a follow up post here largely because it may attract the attention of some readers of this blog who didn't see my post or contribute to it when it was on John's blog. In the next iteration I might see...
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Or, Lapsing, then Lapsing into Solo-dom I think this will be my last post on Troppo . For some time, I've been thinking seriously about a number of conflicting impulses relating to my blogging life. For a start, I really need at this time to focus all my writing energies on my...
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We haven't had a good mindless partisan political stoush on Troppo for ages now. A couple of days at least. So I thought I'd draw readers' attention to this NT News story and see if it elicits the expected polarised Pavlovian reaction: A lesbian is pregnant with twins after ha...
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Old fashioned jingoism and new fashioned marketing collide on the British campaign trail The candidate's grandfather was an illegal immigrant , his campaign strategist is Australian , and his party's voter database software was developed in India . But as Party Co-Chairman Dr...
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A little while back, on one of my literary posts, on nominations for the 'dullest authors', a couple of people commented on how they found Australian writers , in the main, boring and/or unreadable. I thought I'd actually give you a chance here and now to nominate those Austra...
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Norm Geras has collated the results of the 'five favourite composers' poll he ran, and it won't surprise you to know that number one, at 345 votes, is Beethoven, closely followed by Mozart at 340 votes and JS Bach at 335 votes. In fourth place is Schubert, at 119 votes, and Ch...
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"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." - George Orwell. In his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language , George Orwell wrote: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things l...
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One of my favourite bloggers, Phil Gomes over at Citystate has a very interesting reflection on the eclipse of op/ed columnists by bloggers - well worth reading . One of the constant bugbears of the blogosphere is the degree to which it's parasitic on mainstream media. Lately,...
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I'm indebted to "Santamaria socialist" The Currency Lad for his recommendation of John Edwards' new book Curtin's Gift: Reinterpreting Australia's Greatest Prime Minister . I read a lot of Australian political history at Uni, but not much in the way of political biography - th...
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In the comments thread Al Bundy has some kindly advice for parents who want to ban junk food from schools . Nic White says that kids should be able to eat what they like, while Andrew Norton and Michael Warby think that the real problem is that governments are running the scho...
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Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to ban the sale of junk food in California's schools. Naturally, the Center for Consumer Freedom is outraged. When former governor Gray Davis tried to do the same thing Consumer Freedom accused him of confusing the roles of government and f...
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You tend to get a bit complacent about cyclones after a while. We get one or two cyclone watches most years, but they seldom come close enough to do any damage. Fortunately, large ones have a very tight centre, so that really destructive winds don't extend over all that large...
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Sadly, Irish comedian Dave Allen has passed away unexpectedly . His show was one of the highlights of my week's viewing as a kid. May his God go with him .
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If you read nothing else this weekend in the papers, make sure you read The Australian's Middle East correspondent, Nicolas Rothwell, on the colossal blunder Osama Bin Laden made when he attacked America on September 11 2001, and the massive quakes it set off in the Middle Eas...
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Richard Ackland discusses yet another appalling High Court decision in his SMH column this morning. It isn't quite as breathtakingly repugnant as last year's Al-Khateb decision where a strong numerical majority held that it was perfectly lawful for the federal government to ho...
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I love crime fiction; have loved it ever since I discovered it at the age of 12 or 13. Crime fiction, well-written, is one of the most satisfying reading experiences there is: technically, the crime story provides a superb structure; characters are usually at crisis points in...
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A week or so ago I posted and asked about the available options for buying music legally across the Internet. I discovered that the alternatives seem to be quite limited in Australia; there are some pretty good sources, but the biggies like iTunes and Napster don't offer their...
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One of the nice things about blogging and teaching law is that the two often complement each other. Yesterday while searching for additional readings for my first year public law class I stumbled across the fact that legendary US federal judge and incredibly prolific " law and...
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In a classically neo-conservative review for the Public Interest , Kay Hymowitz argues that advertising is corrupting children: The truth is that hundreds of times each day, between television, the Internet, billboards, school vending machines, and curriculums, kids are prodde...
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There's an interesting discussion going on the Howardian power grab vis-a-vis the states over at Catallaxy sparked off by the resident representative of the Carlton-living, latte right Federalist faction of the Liberal Party , that is to say, Andrew Norton. Atypically for rece...
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In light of recent debates at Troppo , readers might be interested in an excellent op/ed piece by Gary Younge in The Guardian .
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A quick update on the IR wars. Kenneth Davidson has a cogent op/ed piece in The Age today demonstrating how lowering the minimum wage would not necessarily contribute to employment, would harm the low-paid, and do nothing for the skills shortage. The government's latest gambit...
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As the intensity and pace of the Troppo culture wars over sexuality and schools diminish rapidly (though increasingly people are commenting elsewhere - see Tim Dunlop's contention that there is no centrist position on the issue recently posted at Road to Surfdom ), it's probab...
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Just eight days after she announced her retirement from blogging , to general and justified lamentations from her devoted readers, Gianna came back ! Yay! Welcome back, G! Why wasn't I told earlier???!!!!
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I'm not inclined to participate further on the debate on non-heterosexualities and school education, partly because I think it's rapidly running its course , and partly because at the moment I can better focus my writing energies on my thesis. So after this post, I'll disappea...
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Rob Corr has put up a very measured post summarising the debate which started with the incident of the student teacher having her prac terminated because she answered children's questions about her same-sex partner over at Kick & Scream . Rob's post is tellingly titled 'Discre...
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Feeling generally overtired, a bit ill, and reeling from all sorts of things that are stressing me, I was delighted to be asked out by a good friend of mine for a Corona or two tonight (a very good rule of thumb is that any drink that can reasonably have a lime in it is a good...
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In light of events at Troppo over the last couple of days, now might be an opportune moment to post an extract from a post by the wise but currently absent Don Arthur at his now-moribund blog: A deeper form of civility asks us to make an effort to treat other people with respe...
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For American talk radio host Bruce DuMont ideas are just another product traded in the marketplace. And unlike some right wing whiners, he thinks the marketplace is working just fine: Yes, my Classically trained friends, "Praise be to Adam Smith!" It is my position that maybe,...
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Unfortunately, I'm feeling unwell today so unable to go into work. Happily, though, this gives me the chance to post on International Women's Day. There are a number of entries around the 'sphere - Rob Corr's birthday is also today, and he has some interesting reflections on c...
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You'd get the impression from parts of the recent comments threads around this joint lately that Western civilisation is about to collapse if the shaky heteronormativity in schools isn't immediately reinforced. As a number of us have pointed out, though, there are real people...
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Mark's posting on what he sees as a 'rightwing PC' intolerance of sexuality in schools has led me to present these few thoughts to Troppo Armadillians, based on my own observations and experiences in schools. I'm not interested in debating the rights and wrongs of the toleranc...
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Much of the talk about IR Reform is based on assertion - and misinformation, or perhaps creating an impression which proves to be untrue on closer inspection, if that's a different thing. The current contention that a panel of experts is needed to assess the economic impact of...
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From the age of 10 we Parish kids were expected to do squad swimming training. Every morning from September to April we'd be driven down to the local pool at South Curl Curl beach before 6am to churn up and down for an hour and a half before school. During the early part of th...
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I previously argued that talk of values - usually found associated with education debates - can be code for imposing conservative social values on everyone , and that one value that rarely gets mentioned is the fundamental liberal value of toleration. As the right wing culture...
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At the very welcome recommendation of a friend, I reread the second "Lightness and Weight" chapter in Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being on Saturday. Kundera reminded me of the truth of a metaphor Maurice Merleau-Ponty used for how our lives are shaped by remembered...
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Fresh from a coup in snatching the free to air coverage of The Ashes series against England which Channel Nine declined and the ABC dithered over, public broadcaster SBS will tonight show highlights of the Danish Royal Wedding . I'll be watching - I still have Princess Diana's...
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I've been collecting and reading old magazines just as long as I've been collecting and reading old books, ie since at least the age of 16. Though the pleasure each has given me is related, old magazines make for a distinctively different reading experience from old books, bec...
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My provocative post about Immanuel Wallerstein seems to have antagonised Mark Bahnisch. I devoutly hope that won't prove terminal to his participation at Troppo, partly because he's a valued blogging colleague, and partly because his prolific posting takes the pressure off me,...
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Or, the Civil in Civility It's odd that we hear so much about the Judaeo-Christian tradition (usually in the context of values) these days from the Culture Warriors who believe that our values are going to ruin all around us . It's as if, like the artist Frederick Goodall , th...
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More attentive Troppo readers may have noticed occasional laudatory references (by Mark Bahnisch and others) to the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein, a lefty sociologist/political theorist whose work is currently all the rage with former Marxists who remain convinced that capi...
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Trackback spam is coming in thick and fast this afternoon. As blogs' defences have eliminated much comment spam, this is the new spammers' method of choice. What's extremely outrageous is that some of the spam that Troppo has been reeling under appears to come from legitimate...
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Directly inspired by Nabokov's comment on my earlier post, 'Best Shakespearean plays', I'm giving you all an opportunity to bury or praise the screen versions of Will's work. Here are my own cheers and boos: Cheers: Trevor Nunn's 1999(I think)version of Twelfth Night, set in a...
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Shaun Carney sums up the intended result of the Howard Government's IR reforms : In practical terms, the changes would be likely to drive wages down at the lower end of the market while also increasing the number of people who can be employed. In that sense, the consequence fo...
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There seems to be some presupposition in the debates over the culture wars that once upon a time, there was an orderly, well educated and prosperous Australian society with no social cleavages and where everyone knew the 3 Rs and knew their place. It's the hidden premise, if y...
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Here's the chance for a bit of listmania--what are your top five favourite Shakespeare plays, and why? Before I list my own faves, I'd like to give you a bit of my own personal background regarding Shakespeare. As a child growing up in a French family, albeit mostly in Austral...
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The Northern Territory's Martin Labor government is about to introduce so-called "whistleblower" legislation here. I only found out when an ABC radio compere rang up wanting me to do an interview about it (which I will be on Monday morning). I had to confess that I'd been so b...
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Here's a guest post by Kevin Donnelly (who as many readers will recall, is an educationalist who has written extensively on curriculum issues, especially regarding the teaching English in high schools). Also see the various posts about education policy in the Troppo archives ,...
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One thing I share with Neo-Conservatives (and there aren't too many to put it very mildly) is a belief that politics is and ought to be about much more than the economy (though I deplore their economic irresponsibility). This insight, of course, is not original to Neo-Conserva...
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Frequent Troppo commenter and proprietrix of her own blog, yellowvinyl , who's a friend of mine, rang me today to let me know that she has cancer. She asked me to pass on her apologies for being testy in comments threads, which I'm sure are wholly unnecessary in any case. She'...
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...quoth Federal Treasurer Peter Costello . 0.1% growth in the December quarter, 1.5% over the year. This character is looking more and more like a clown, or as Homer Paxton argues, a barrister with no grasp of economics making the best case. Since everything's currently (and...
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In my previous post on right wing postmodernism , I referred to the work of American political theorist Sheldon S. Wolin. Wolin also has some relevant points to make about the "underclass" debate , which surfaced on Troppo in the wake of the Macquarie Fields riots. Wolin trace...
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Chris referred in his post on po/mo and history to right postmodernists such as Kojeve and Fukuyama. These figures - both enormously influential - and both central to my PhD thesis, would be worth a post in their own right. But I want to pick up on something said in comments b...
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Does anyone know what the current situation is with music download sites in Australia? I briefly used dodgy sites like Kazaa and Morpheus a couple of years ago, and allowed [my daughter] Rebecca to do so as well. I eventually made her stop doing it partly because I was conscio...
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First, it was Kinsey : ... the right-wing police have turned their sights on Bill Condon's new biopic, Kinsey, in the same hysterical terms that greeted Alfred Kinsey himself more than half a century ago: Such immoral subjects shouldn't be made public. Robert Knight, the (pred...
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John Quiggin (who's collecting quite a bit of Troppo attention lately) has a post dealing with a recent NSW Court of Criminal Appeal decision which set aside the verdict, conviction and sentence against an alleged heroin dealer. Here's the newspaper story about it, and here ar...
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As Labour ministers backed down on aspects of the Terrorism Prevention Bill after losing a division in the House of Commons and being roundly condemned by MPs from all parties for the anti-civil libertarian aspects of the bill, a big contrast can be drawn with the latest devel...
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John Quiggin's full black beard is probably the most famous in Australian blogdom . Prominently displayed on his blog 's masthead, the beard attracts regular comment - not all of it favorable . Recently two postgraduate researchers at the University of London reported that, am...
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On another thread, Chris pointed out an uncanny resemblance between Princess Mary and Emma Peel . This leads me to muse - why is it that the film adaptation of The Avengers is largely without grace, charm or wit compared to the wonderful original tv series ? Bad scriptwriting,...
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Something like that was the reported 'slogan' of the 'Kelly Gang' of the Glenqarie Estate in Macquarie Fields, in Sydney's south-west. Two of the members of that hell-raising group of family and friends died in a high-speed car chase, setting off several days of riots. It's al...
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What astonishes the contemporary reader is, first of all, that a genuine, independent intellectual like Galbraith was permitted to serve in government, let alone become the confidant of presidents. Facile anti-intellectualism is the order of the day now... Thomas Frank, author...
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